To blame, they say, are factors such as the perception that candidates Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel do not really have any major differences between them and the possibility of voter fatigue with the 2012 presidential election less than a year ago.

"If the turnout ends up being as low as we believe, it's an embarrassing statement about the level of interest in this campaign," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

Schnur also directs the USC Price/Los Angeles Times Poll, the latest of which anticipates that only 25 percent of registered Los Angeles city residents will vote in today's election. That level of turnout would be an improvement over the nominally competitive 2009 election in which less than 16 percent of voters gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a second term, but low enough for observers to contend that Los Angeles' elections system needs to be fixed.

Possible means to enhance turnout for city elections include rescheduling the events so that voters go to the polls, although opinions differ on when an ideal time would be.

Schnur, along with Fernando Guerra, director of the Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, agree that Los Angeles is making a mistake by holding its elections in the springs of odd-numbered years.

Low turnout "should be a wake-up call that we should move our elections to even-numbered years," Schnur said.

Presidential and California's gubernatorial elections take place on different four-year cycles ending on even-numbered years, so Californians have the opportunity to vote in major elections every two years.

Although politics get more attention on those even-numbered years, the potential problem is that municipal races would be overshadowed by the bigger competitions. That's why Guerra proposes that local elections remain scheduled for odd-numbered years, but that all city elections should take place in November.

"People associate voting with November," he said.

That, Guerra said, would mean that voters from Los Angeles to Long Beach to Claremont to San Bernardino would be thinking about local elections at the same time.

Another issue affecting the possibility of low turnout on Tuesday is the perception that Garcetti and Greuel are not very different.

Aside from the key exception of Greuel being the chosen candidate of organized labor, there does not seem to be another city issue, such as traffic relief, in which the candidates offer clearly different solutions, USC political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe said.

"Labor unions are invested in this election, and they have chosen by and large, if not uniformly, for Wendy Greuel," Jeffe said.

On the subject of turnout, however, Jeffe did not propose improvements to the system itself as much as she pointed to candidates' needs to motivate residents to cast ballots.

"If you want to increase turnout, politicians and campaigns have to identify their voters and bring them kicking and screaming to the ballot box," she said.

Voter turnout of about 25 percent in Los Angeles would at least be better than turnout in the recent special election for a state Senate district that represents portions of eastern Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire.

Fewer than 10 percent of the district's voters participated in the March 12 and May 14 elections that ultimately elected Assemblywoman Norma Torres to the state Senate. Torres' move will further augment Democrats' supermajority in the Legislature's upper chamber, and the fact the balance of power in Sacramento was not hinging on the results of that contest can explain why so many voters chose to ignore the election.

"Special elections just tend not to draw many voters. In this case, control of the Legislature was not at stake," Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said. "People will come out to vote when they think they are going" to decide something important. "